When Things Get Personal

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Communications Management   Leadership   Talent Management   Teams   ProjectsAtWork  

It’s a sad reality, but sooner or later you will have to deal with inappropriate behavior directed toward a team member. How you handle the situation can not only make or break the project, it can have a profound and lasting effect on the people involved.

We are all well aware that office conversations happen every day that start with “Did you hear what he or she did?” And there is not much we can do to stop it from happening. But when the idle chatter starts to transform itself into mockery or humiliation, when it crosses from comments about work to comments about a person, you have a problem that needs to be dealt with immediately. An example might serve to illustrate the difference.

Imagine a situation where a mistake by a developer prevents a tester from performing his tasks. An appropriate response would be to sit down with the developer and point out that a mistake had occurred, focusing on the task rather than the individual, explaining the impact, and working together to put a recovery plan in place. Some may argue that the project manager should be engaged, but in most cases the team members should be able to work it out between them.

Things start to become inappropriate as soon as one individual starts to extrapolate a mistake into a personal attack — “you don’t have any idea” or “how can you not understand this&…

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